German street artist EVOL (previously) is currently showing a number of new pieces atJonathan LeVine gallery. The new works feature urban facades spray painted with the use of stencils on flat sheets of cardboard. Much like his outdoor graffiti, these stencils display an uncanny attention to detail, depicting light and shadow that transforms mundane surfaces of consumer packaging into fascinating, seemingly multi-dimensional pieces of art.

In the world of contemporary art, when you ask an artist about the messages that he/she is trying to convey, you are most likely to receive a pompous answer/just another boring cliché. This was not the case with Henrique Oliveira, theBrazilian emerging artist known for his spatial wooden pieces whose irregular forms devour large spaces which give you the sense that you are actually inhabiting someone’s body. His answer had no unnecessary use of any conceptual lingo. ”I believe that the message is never art itself, but instead, the lack of a message is a characteristic that makes some creations interesting to me,” he says, adding ”my works may propose a spatial experience, an aesthetic feeling, a language development and many more nominations to refer to the relation it establishes with the viewer. But, any attempt to find a message would fail.”.

His wooden pieces are chaotic and abstract. They, however, have a natural feeling to them in contrast to his older paintings, which are less naturalistic. ”They have two different moods and I like to have them in parallel, I think they even work as a compensation for each other,” he says adding: ”The artificiality of my paintings is related to the materials and the colors I use, but they have a truth in the sense that they don’t try to be anything they are not, what you see there, is paint manipulated on a surface. My wood constructions are natural in their materiality, but they are artificial in the sense that they give the viewer a sensation of something that is actually not happening.”

Henrique Oliveira’s wooden pieces carry two different themes. ”I call them pictorial and organic,” he says. Although he always starts from a sketch, when occupying large spaces his work is made in a much freer way. “In the organic works, which are based on more clear references such as skin, bellies, organ, or tumors, I tend to follow a plan which can be changed a little bit on the way.”

Whether organic or pictorial, Henrique Oliveira knows that his works transmit a sense of temporality. His aged wooden pieces ”show the transformation of matter,” he explains. However, ”there is also a temporality that is more about the present. There is a sense of movement”. This temporality is both deliberate and dictates the form of the work. In his very round wooden installations he explores the elasticity of PVC tubes playing with the idea of swollen walls. Through these pieces, he gives a sense of movement whilst creating dramatic surfaces that capture viewers.

Anyway, that was it..for full text and more images visit Yatzer’s post HERE